Switch - Chip Heath [94]
Well aware of the power of contagious behavior, a group of social psychologists persuaded a hotel manager to test out a new sign in the hotel bathrooms. The sign didn’t mention the environment at all; it simply said that the “the majority of guests at the hotel” reuse their towels at least once during their stay. It worked—guests who got this sign were 26 percent more likely to reuse their towels. They took cues from the herd.
Note the downside, though. If the sign had said, “About 8% of our guests decide to reuse their towels,” new guests would have been less likely to reuse theirs. (The same effect explains why you don’t tip the person who bags your groceries, even though that person is doing as much valuable work as your barista. The herd told you not to.) In situations where your herd has embraced the right behavior, publicize it. For instance, if 80 percent of your team submits time sheets on time, make sure the other 20 percent knows the group norm. Those individuals almost certainly will correct themselves. But if only 10 percent of your team submits time sheets on time, publicizing those results will hurt, not help.
When the norms are against you, what can you do to rally the herd? That, in essence, was the problem facing Gerard Cachon, a Wharton School operations professor. In 2006, Cachon became the editor of the journal Manufacturing and Service Operations Management (MSOM). Here are the titles of some of the articles featured in MSOM:
“Requirements Planning with Substitutions: Exploiting Bill-of-Materials Flexibility in Production Planning”
“A General Framework for the Study of Decentralized Distribution Systems”
“Stock Positioning and Performance Estimation in Serial Productions-Transportation Systems”
“Contract Assembly: Dealing with Combined Supply Lead Time and Demand Quantity Uncertainty”
If you just felt your pulse quicken, you are definitely an operations person.
Needless to say, MSOM isn’t the kind of mass-appeal periodical that will be shelved between Maxim and People at the local newsstand. Its role is to showcase the latest thinking in the field of operations. Professors compete strenuously to get their articles published in journals like MSOM, because in order to get promoted within their university departments, they need a solid track record of publication. (You’ve probably heard the expression “Publish or perish.”)
Getting articles published is a long process. First, you do a lot of research—often several years’ worth. Then you write an article describing the research and submit it to a journal. The journal editor farms out your article to “peer reviewers”—other professors who agree to critique your piece (anonymously). The editor then summarizes the opinions of these reviews and delivers a verdict—yes, no, or revise and resubmit. If you get the R&R verdict, you’ll often have to launch some new research to plug the holes in your work, and if you do that, you can eventually resubmit your paper for a new cycle of reviews. It’s an exhausting process—it routinely takes years to get a paper published.
A key bottleneck is the peer review stage. If it takes a long time for other professors to read the article and give feedback, the whole process grinds to a halt. The standard review times for many academic journals range from three to six months. A frontline scientific journal like Science or Nature might get reviews done in a few weeks.
When Gerard Cachon took over MSOM, most peer reviews were taking from